Sausage stuffing devices ranging from relatively simple hand operated mechanisms to large, fairly complex automated devices are well known and commonly utilized throughout the industry. Such devices necessarily include means for holding and pressurizing the sausage mix and some confining conduit normally referred to as a horn whereby sausage mix may be direced into a sausage casing and the like in order to form a finished product. Dependent, of course, upon the source or sources of the material comprising the sausage mix such material may include in addition to edible portions such as both skeletal and non-skeletal meat, material normally considered edible such as relatively hard or tough components including bone, gristle, tendons, etc. Naturally, the less such hard particles present in the finished sausage product enables a more appetizing and easily chewed and digested product to be presented to the consuming public. Also substantial removal thereof would serve to additionally reduce potential injury to consumers i.e., damaged teeth and/or dentures.
Accordingly, attempts have been made in the past to reduce or limit the amount of such undesirable hard particles within finished products. Generally, such attempts took the form of the inclusion of a strainer element logically positioned downstream of the mix reservoir and upstream of the stuffing horn. Various such strainer configurations are depicted in the following U.S. Pat. No.: 80,035 issued July 14, 1868; U.S. Pat. No. 1,796,667 issued Mar. 17, 1931; and U.S. Pat. No. 2,253,465 issued Aug. 19, 1941.
In addition to such above-indicated devices, it is also known to remove totally foreign material from such sausage mix as by the magnetic removal thereof as indicated in U.S. Pat. No. 2,619,674 issued Dec. 2, 1952. Also, more recently, devices which attempt a higher recovery of edible meat portions from material containing both edible and normally inedible components have been introduced such as the devices et forth in U.S. Pat. No. 2,734,540 issued Feb. 14, 1956 and U.S. Pat. No. 3,906,118 issued Sept. 16, 1975.
No straightforward, relatively simple device, however, exists for removing hard particles from sausage mix wherein the strainer orifices thereof are not unduly restrictive to continued flow mix or which otherwise do not require overly complex or expensive machinery.